Multi Area Agreement

Matt Desmier came over to set the group a new live brief. It was to design an identity for a new government initiative called the Multi Area Agreement. It has been set up to bring together the towns of Dorset and allow them to work closer. I liked the sound of the brief and it sounded like a good opportunity to design another identity for a company. I decided to work in a pair with fellow student Luke Carré and we straight away when i got some time we got some ideas down on illustrator. This was probably a mistake as we didn't take much time to think of a concept or what we were doing, we just went ahead and did it. It wasn't long until we realised the designs weren't good enough. After that, we had a good think about a concept that would work for them. We looked hard at what they were looking for which we believed was something that represented Dorset and showed how it was all together. After that we got a map of Dorset and started to get some ideas and concepts from that. I started looking at each town on the map and thought about how each town could be shown in the logo. The simple answer was to put each town on the logo which we did by making each one into a dot. This was working,well as a concept but on its own wasn't really enough. It led me to thinking about the size of each town and whether i could show the difference in sizes between them all. I found out each population of the towns on the map:

I then worked out a ration between each population and created different sized circles for each town. After that i put each into its place on the logo:


Next came the colours. In black and white it was boring, but where to get the colours from was the next issue. We decided to look at each towns/councils website/logos to find out what was the predominant colour in each one. Luckily, Dorset itself can easily be shown in 3 colours as it is often spoken of as the sunniest county. The main colours we found were the same as the Dorset ones: Green, Blue and Yellow. Putting the opacity of each circle made them link together really well in areas where there were towns with big populations such as Poole and Bournemouth which added to the concept of the logo.


The next issue was the type. We played around with numerous fonts and layouts, some a lot more "radical" than others but eventually we decided that Garamond Premier Pro did not suit the logo. The layouts were the other issue and as i said, we played around with some alternative designs but we settled for the layout that we thought would be best for the company.

We were really liking where this was going but wanted to take it further still.